Flames in the Sky: Epic stories of WWII air war heroism from the author of The Big Show (Pierre Clostermann's Air War Collection Book 2)

by Pierre Clostermann

  Admiral Ugaki was already over the island. It was nothing but a burnt shell, gashed by the zigzags of the trenches and pitted with bomb craters so close together that they overlapped. Not a tree, not a speck of green left. The bulldozers were pushing up mounds of earth to block the entrances of underground shelters where whole companies of Japanese soldiers had been burnt alive by flame-throwers. Already the smoke-pots on the shore were beginning to vomit a thick protective screen, swept and scattered over Bruckner Bay by the violent wind. But it was too late, and the anchored fleet, lit up with the flashes from the guns, was putting up an umbrella of explosives and steel.

  The Baka, now at only 5000 feet, skimmed the sides of Mount Kuribare, where burnt-out shells of tanks still lay among the streams of lava.

  At last, the objective. The anchorage was fringed with the gaping hulls of grounded ships—the work of Kamikazes. What would be a target worthy of the sacrifice? The cruisers with their slender funnels? The South Dakota class battleships? There were three of these at anchor, squatting on their antitorpedo bulges.

  Or, better still, the big, square aircraft-carriers, with their lopsided superstructure.

  His mind was made up. He fired his last three rockets and at 600 m.p.h., like a comet dragging its fiery trail, the Baka bore down upon the biggest of the carriers.

  The steel ring of his rudimentary sight encircled the medley of platforms forming the control tower on the side of the flight-deck. The Baka was so fast that all he saw of the ships he skimmed past was the flashes from their A.A. batteries. He dived through a tunnel of tracer and passed between a double row of spurts cutting up the sea.

  Ugaki was now skimming a few feet above the water. The enormous grey mass rose up and towered above him. Only a few yards now—men running—shells converging on him from forty guns—rows of rivets showing on the hull.

  He squared his shoulders, shouting Banzai! Before the Sun of death he had not blenched.

  At a speed of nearly 1000 feet a second the Baka had perforated the hull and exploded in No. 2 hangar of the Savo Island.

  The blast had piled the twenty-odd planes inside the hangar into a crushed heap, together with the men working on them. A flood of burning petrol engulfed everything. Luckily the plane-lift was down, otherwise the imprisoned gases would have burst the ship. As it was, they escaped through the gaping hole. The pumps swamped the burning hangar with carbonic foam and saved the aircraft-carrier.

  Thirty-nine men were killed and many others knocked out by the shock. When the fire was out, all they found of the Baka and its pilot were the arming-vanes of the percussion cap, a few scraps of twisted metal and a Samurai sword. Inside the charred sheath the blade was intact.

  While this drama unfolded, the twelve faithful Georges had come down with the two Myrts in their final dive. Afterwards they had climbed again at full throttle, only to be set upon immediately by thirty P-5 Is, joined almost at once by twenty-four P-47s. Fifty-four to twelve—the pendulum had swung back a long way since Bataan!

  Thanks to their superior manoeuvrability, four Georges succeeded in getting away, while the others succumbed to sheer numbers. The four survivors, faster than the P-5 Is, regrouped over the sea and, in perfect formation, made straight for a large transport which was preparing to enter Kyuku roads. The American A.A. did not shoot, thinking they were P-47s, which were very similar in appearance.

  The 2500 tons of explosives in the ship’s holds produced an absolute tidal wave.

  So ended the last Kamikaze mission of the war.

  * * *

  The next day the Domei agency announced that Japan was laying down arms according to the terms of the Potsdam declaration, with a proviso concerning the spiritual authority of the Emperor. On 15th August President Truman officially confirmed the end of hostilities.

  More even than by the atomic bomb the Japanese had been crushed by American air power in the Pacific. The American Army and Navy Air Forces, more or less wiped out in the initial assault, had quickly been built up again. The Army Air Force on 1st January 1943 had 1622 combat planes and 91,600 men in the Pacific. In 1944 these figures were 3174 planes and 245,077 men. On 1st January 1945 it had 4911 planes and 402,406 men, and this reached, on 1st August 1945, a total of 7260 planes and 467,957 men.

  The Naval Air Force expanded from 127 planes on 10th December 1941 to 14,648 planes on 1st August 1945.

  The Japanese Air Forces had 2520 front-line planes and 78,520 men in January 1942; 3200 planes and 84,500 men in January 1943; 4050 planes and 117,000 men in January 1944; 4150 planes and 184,250 men in January 1945. Finally, on the day of the Armistice there were left 4600 front-line planes, plus about 5000 planes modified for Kamikaze work.

  General Kawabe, director for Kamikaze operations in the Imperial G.H.Q., later declared before an American court of enquiry:

  ‘We do not wish you to describe the Kamikaze tactics as suicide-attacks. The Kamikaze pilot regarded himself as a human bomb which was going to destroy a unit of the fleet attacking his country. He derived glory from it. I do not believe that these methods materially contributed towards our defeat. Right up to the end we thought we could counterbalance your material and scientific strength with our spiritual convictions and our moral strength.

  ‘Whatever you may think about the Kamikazes, you can be certain that the pilots died happy, in the firm conviction that their sacrifice was one more step towards the Emperor’s victory.’

  How can one answer a declaration of that sort? Our European minds are just baffled.

  However, on 9th August 1945, Admiral Ugaki and Admiral Fukada did not die for victory. They died because they did not want to survive defeat, and that, for the first time, brings their gesture within the scope of our comprehension.

  Notes on the Baka, the German ‘Natter’, the Myrt and the George

  At both ends of the earth the disproportion of strength and the growing shadow of defeat forced Japanese and German engineers into a desperate search for defensive weapons.

  The Japanese problem was how to stop the American Navy and prevent it getting close to Japan. Only the most extreme measures could be of any avail. After using normal aircraft on Kamikaze missions, the next step was logically—if that is the right word—to build special machines still better adapted for this blood-curdling sport. The result was the Baka, whose main characteristics are made clear in the previous chapter.

  The feature about this machine which strikes the European most forcibly is that once the pilot was inside and it had been hoisted into the parent plane’s bomb-bay, it was impossible for him to change his mind and get out.

  The Baka pilot only had four instruments: an air-speed indicator, an altimeter, an artificial horizon and a compass. Although the control surfaces were very small, the pilot had to exert considerable muscular strength to manoeuvre his plane owing to the speed at which it flew. In addition, the total duration of its flight was only five minutes or so—representing a range of only forty miles—so that the pilot had a very short time to get his machine under control and lined-up on the objective. Furthermore, the last six miles were flown at a speed approaching that of sound, which again complicated the pilot’s task. As a result, only the most experienced pilots were entrusted with these highly tricky machines.

  The first 300 Bakas were stored in the underground hangars on Okinawa, and the Japanese, who were taken by surprise by the American landings, could neither use them nor evacuate them—a lucky break for the U.S. Navy!

  They continued to be produced on Kyushu, but the end was drawing near. About 150 were used, and only a rather small proportion—about 30 per cent.—scored hits.

  The prototype of a Baka which could take off under its own power, by means of five solid-explosive rockets and two German Walter rockets, was found in the naval depot at Yokusoka.

  The German problem was not dissimilar. It consisted in stopping the R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. heavy bombers. Heinkel, Messerschmitt, Junkers and Bachem all submitted proposals. Bachem�
�s was the one to be taken up. His solution seems so fantastic, even today, that it gives any normal pilot an icy shiver down his spine. It was the BP ‘Natter’, or ‘viper’. The Natter was 16 feet long, had a wing-span of 10 feet and a wing area of 60 square feet. The power unit was a Walter Hwk 509 rocket developing a 3700-lb. thrust for four minutes. Climbing vertically, the Natter could reach 500 m.p.h., and when straight and level it touched 600 m.p.h.

  Once the pilot was strapped into the tiny cockpit, the contraption was mounted on a vertical catapult and fired by means of two powder rockets when the enemy bombers were a few miles distant. Within a few seconds the pilot was within range, or that was the idea anyway. All he had to do was get a Flying Fortress bang in front of him, and let fly with the twenty R4M rockets in the nose of his machine. This should pulverise the Fortress. Then the pilot pressed a button, detonating two explosive charges, whereupon the Natter broke into two pieces, ejecting the pilot on one parachute and the Walter rocket on another. Not an everyday idea, exactly.

  The first test model—how on earth could people be found to take this sort of thing on!—did not stand up to the acceleration and the machine did a loop on take-off and crashed at 600 m.p.h. The pilot, according to the phrase current among fighter pilots, received a synthetic funeral.

  The second took off all right, but he failed to get out and was killed. So was the third. Luckily for the fourth the Armistice arrived.

  Ten or so complete ‘Natters’ were captured by the Allies, and the Americans tried to make two captured German test-pilots repeat the experiment, at Muroc in the U.S.A. As can be imagined, they refused politely, and every argument failed, from friendly persuasion and promises, via appeals to national pride, to threats of forced labour. One can sympathise.

  One radio-controlled ‘Natter’ was launched, got out of hand, and crashed on a drug-store in Las Vegas. Energetic protests came from the inhabitants and the Press, and that was the end of the Bachem experiment.

  The Saiun—American code-name ‘Myrt’—was a development of the type which the firm of Nakajima had specialised in; a fast single-engined plane operating from aircraft-carriers and with a crew of either two or three. It was a development of the Kate and the Jill, which had been very successful in torpedo attacks during the battles of Guadalcanal and Midway.

  The Myrt was also used by the Navy as a reconnaissance plane, by reason of its speed and its wide range. It was a single-engined low-wing plane, of metal construction and with very clean lines. It had a 1970-h.p. double-row radial engine and weighed only 3.5 tons unloaded, or just under 6 tons loaded and with fuel for 3000 miles. Its speed at 16,000 feet was not quite 400 m.p.h. As the Grumman Wildcat only did 320 m.p.h. and the Hellcat 380 m.p.h., there was no American carrier-borne plane capable of catching it. The Saiun—the word means ‘many-coloured cloud’—was, in fact, a very successful plane.

  The Shiden, or ‘violet lightning’, and better known by its code-name of ‘George’, came into service towards the end of 1944, like the Saiun. From then on it gradually began to replace the Zero as the standard front-line fighter.

  Its production on a large scale was slowed down by the bombing of Kobe in January 1945, which destroyed the assembly plant. This was lucky for the Allies, as it was a tough customer. It had four cannon in the wings and two machine-guns firing through the propeller. Its rate of climb was 4250 feet a minute and its speed straight and level was 425 m.p.h. at 20,000 feet. It weighed 2.5 tons unloaded and could execute a 360-degree turn in ten seconds, just like the Zero. But unlike the Zero it had self-sealing tanks and a certain amount of armour-plating for the pilot.

  It had a Homare 21 eighteen-cylinder double-row radial engine with two-stage supercharger and a four-bladed propeller. Its span was 39 feet 4 inches and its length 29 feet 3 inches, producing a very adequate wing area and a ridiculously low wing loading, a guarantee of excellent manoeuvrability.

  Unlike the Zero, the George was a land-plane, not equipped for operating from aircraft-carriers. This detail shows how the situation for Japan had changed since 1942. Then the Japanese were very much on the offensive and had nothing but carrier-borne fighters. In 1944 the grip of the American task-forces had tightened and the bombing of the Japanese mainland was getting more severe. Japan could only be defended from bases on her own soil.

  THE END

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in Great Britain in 1952 by Chatto and Windus, Ltd.

  Flammarion, Paris, 2008

  This edition published by Silvertail Books in 2021

  www.silvertailbooks.com

  1

  The right of Pierre Clostermann to be identified as the author

  Of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system,

  in any form or by any means, without permission

  in writing from Silvertail Books or the copyright holder

  Endnotes

  * * *

  [1] In addition to the radar information, two other facts ought to have alerted Pearl Harbor. At 6.51 a Japanese midget submarine was sunk, just after coming into the fairway, by the destroyer Ward, which immediately sent in a signal. At 6.53 the control room on the aircraft-carrier Enterprise heard the pilot of one of it patrolling aircraft sent over Ford island, Ensign Manoel Gonzales, yell: ‘Don’t shoot. I’m American. Christ!’ The Zeros were shooting him down.

  Unfortunately no one was in command at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Stark and General Short each kept a jealous eye on the other Service, stuck to his own planes, and tried to palm off all the dirty jobs on to the other.

  [2] These code-names were not given until later in the war, but are used here for convenience. The planes were Aichi Type 99 (Val); Nakajima Type 97 (Kate); and Mitsubishi Type O (Zeke, generally known as Zero).

  [3] ‘We were afraid of a preventive raid by the Americans, and as our attack, which was supposed to be synchronised with the attack on Pearl Harbor, could not take place at the time envisaged owing to bad weather, we were prepared for the worst. Imagine our surprise when we found the American planes, on Clark Field and elsewhere, lined up on the ground as if for a general inspection.’ (Testimony by Admiral Tsukahara, September 1945.)

  [4] The international date line in the Pacific meant that 7th December at Pearl Harbor corresponded to 6th December in the Philippines.

  [5] I.e. to be dismantled, and their individual parts made available for other planes.

  [6] Letter to the author from Colonel A. Ind, General George’s Chief of Staff during the Bataan campaign, dated 7th October 1950.

  [7] g=centrifugal force, measured in multiples of the force of gravity.

  [8] oleos = the legs of the undercarriage.

  [9] Colonel Ezanno, probably the best all-round French pilot of the Second World War, was at the time of writing Inspector of Fighter Aircraft with the French Air Ministry.

  [10] Except France. Let it be remembered to her honour, de Gaulle had two very heated discussions with Stalin on the subject of Warsaw and did not budge an inch.

  [11] Safe flying-speed is the minimum speed at which a plane can fly and turn if one of its engines packs up.

  [12] F/Lt. MacGregor, stupefied by the fumes, ditched his plane and was picked up off Scapa Flow the next morning by a destroyer. But the North Sea in January is unforgiving and he died in Kirkwall hospital two days later.

  [13] ‘Faster, Jaguar!’

  [14] ‘Jaguar! Caruso 240—everyone turn left.’

  [15] The Kamikaze is the commonest name and was the only one used by the Allies. The Japanese did, however, use other names, including Tokkotai, Shinshu and Kamiwashi. Formosa pilots used the term Makoto, and those from Kyushu used Shimbu, a word meaning ‘brave.’

  [16] The Yamato and her
sister-ship the Musashi were the two most powerful warships in the world, more powerful even than the Tirpitz or the Bismarck. They displaced 75,000 tons (the Vanguard displaces 42,500 tons), had a speed of 30 knots, and had nine 16-inch guns, plus formidable secondary armament. Both were sunk by air attack.

  [17] Oka was the Japanese name, which meant ‘thunderclap.’ The Americans called them Baka, meaning ‘madman’, and they are usually known under this name.

  [18] These were the very terms used in the second broadcast from Tokyo radio announcing the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  [19] See note at end of chapter.

  [20] See note at end of chapter.